of its Macedonian name and the permanent revival of its ancient title, even by Greeks.
As Beroea we hear of the place in Seleucid wars and dissensions. There Menelaus, the fomenter of war with the Asmoneans, was put to death by Lysias in 164 B.C., “as the manner is in that place” (Macc. ii. 13. 4), being thrown into a lofty tower full of cinders. There Heracleon, the court favourite and murderer of Antiochus Grypus, was born and made himself a principality (96 B.C.); and there the son of the latter king besieged his brother Philip in the last struggle for the heritage of Seleucus. As Chalybon, the town is called by Ptolemy head of a district, Chalybonitis; but we continue to hear of it as Beroea up to the Arab conquest, e.g. in the history of Julian’s eastward march in A.D. 363, and in that of the Persian raid of 540. It was occupied in 611 by Chosroes II. Overwhelmed by the Saracen flood in A.D. 638, Beroea disappears, and as Moslem society settles down Halep emerges again as the great gathering-place of caravans passing from Asia Minor and Syria to Mesopotamia, Bagdad and the Persian and Indian kingdoms. Like Antioch it suffered from earthquakes, and late in the 12th century, after a terrible shock, had to be rebuilt by Nur ed-Din. But neither earthquakes nor the plague, to which it was also peculiarly liable, could divert trade and prosperity from it. It belonged to the Eastern Caliphate (the Hamdanids) until temporarily reoccupied by John Zimisces, emperor of Byzantium and a native of neighbouring Hierapolis (q.v.), A.D. 974, after an abortive attempt by Nicephorus thirteen years earlier. Thirteen years later it recognized and received the Fatimites, and passed under various Moslem dynasties, forming part of the Seljuk dominion from 1090 to 1117. The crusading princes of Antioch never held the place, though they attacked it in 1124; and Saladin, who took it in 1183, made it a stronghold against them and the northern capital of himself and his successors until the Tatar invasion of 1260. Thereafter the Mamelukes took and kept possession, despite the renewed Tatar inroad of 1401, until the final conquest by the Ottomans in 1517. Under the strong hand of the latter the trade of Aleppo with the East revived. One of the first provincial factories and consulates of the British Turkey (Levant) Company was established there in the reign of James I.; and a British agent had been in residence there even in Elizabeth’s time. As the eastern outpost of the company’s operations, it was connected with the western outpost of the East India Company in Bagdad by a private postal service, and its name became very familiar in England from the part that its merchants (largely Jewish) bore in the transmission of Eastern products to Europe (cf., e.g. Shakespeare, Macb. i. 3. 7; Oth. v. 2. 352). Through it passed the silks of Bambyce, called bombazines, the light textiles of Mosul (mosulines—muslins) and many other commodities for the wealthy and luxurious. The first blow was struck at this trade by the discovery of the Cape route to India; the second by the opening of a land route through Egypt to the Red Sea; the third and final one by the making of the Suez Canal. Long ere this last event, however, Aleppo had been declining from internal causes. In the latter part of the 18th century and the first years of the 19th it was constantly the scene of bloody dissensions between two rival parties, one led by the local janissaries, the other by the sherifs (religious); and the Ottoman governors took the side, now of one, now of the other, in order to plunder a distracted city, too far removed from the centre to be controlled by the sultans, and too near the rebellious pashalik of Acre and the unsettled district of Lebanon not to be affected by the disorders natural to a frontier province. This state of things led to the suspension of the British consulate by the Turkey Company in 1791; and it was not revived till 1800, after which date till 1825 it was maintained jointly by the East India Company. In 1803 Jezzar of Acre advanced as near as Hamah; but his death occurred in the following year; and after a sanguinary rising in 1805, Aleppo settled down, but was not at peace, even after a local janissary massacre in 1814, till Mahmud II. had dealt finally with the corps at headquarters (1826). Meanwhile there had been a frightful earthquake in 1822, and a visitation of cholera in the following year. More cholera in 1827 and 1832 and another earthquake in 1830 had left the place a wreck, with only half its former population, when Mehemet Ali of Cairo invaded and took Syria. Aleppo shared, and to some extent headed, the Syrian discontent with Egyptian rule, and was strongly held by troops whose huge barracks are still one of the sights of the city. Ready to rise behind Ibrahim Pasha in 1839, it was only prevented by the news of Nezib. Tumults and massacres of Christians occurred in 1850 and 1862, accompanied by great destruction of property; but on the whole, since the consolidation of Ottoman rule over Syria by Abdul Mejid’s ministers, Aleppo has been reviving, although its trade is more local than of old.
Bibliography.—F. R. Chesney, The Euphrates Expedition (1850); H. Guys, Statistique Pachalik d’Alep (1853), and Esquisse de l’état de la Syrie (1862); E. B. B. Barker, Syria and Egypt (1876); W. F. Ainsworth, Personal Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition (1888); E. R. Bevan, House of Seleucus (1902); G. le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems (1890). (D. G. H.)
ALES (Alesius), ALEXANDER (1500–1565), Scottish divine of the school of Augsburg, whose family name was Alane, was born at Edinburgh on the 23rd of April 1500. He studied at St Andrews in the newly-founded college of St Leonard’s, where he graduated in 1515. Some time afterwards he was appointed a canon of the collegiate church, and at first contended vigorously for the scholastic theology as against the doctrines of the Reformers. His views were entirely changed, however, on the execution of Patrick Hamilton, abbot of Fern, in 1528. He had been chosen to meet Hamilton in controversy, with a view to convincing him of his errors, but the arguments of the Scottish proto-martyr, and above all the spectacle of his heroism at the stake, impressed Alesius so powerfully that he was entirely won over to the cause of the Reformers. A sermon which he preached before the Synod at St Andrews against the dissoluteness of the clergy gave great offence to the provost, who cast him into prison, and might have carried his resentment to the extremest limit had not Alesius contrived to escape to Germany in 1532. After travelling in various countries of northern Europe, he settled down at Wittenberg, where he made the acquaintance of Luther and Melanchthon, and signed the Augsburg confession. Meanwhile he was tried in Scotland for heresy and condemned without a hearing. In 1533 a decree of the Scottish clergy, prohibiting the reading of the New Testament by the laity, drew from Alesius a defence of the right of the people, in the form of a letter to James V. A reply to this by John Cochlaeus, also addressed to the Scottish king, occasioned a second letter from Alesius, in which he not only amplifies his argument with great force, but enters into more general questions connected with the Reformation. In August 1534 he and a few others were excommunicated at Holyrood by the deputy of the archbishop of St Andrews. When Henry VIII. broke with the church of Rome Alesius was induced to go to England, where he was very cordially received (August 1535) by the king and his advisers Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell. After a short residence at Lambeth he was appointed, through the influence of Cromwell, then chancellor of the university, to lecture on theology at Cambridge; but when he had delivered a few expositions of the Hebrew psalms, he was compelled by the opposition of the papal party to desist. Returning to London he supported himself for some time by practising as a physician. In 1537 he attended a convocation of the clergy, and at the request of Cromwell conducted a controversy with Stokesley, bishop of London, on the nature of the sacraments. His argument was afterwards published under the title Of the Auctorite of the Word of God concerning the number of the Sacraments. In 1539 Alesius was compelled to flee for the second time to Germany, in consequence of the enactment of the statute of the Six Articles. He was appointed to a theological chair in the university of Frankfort-on-Oder, where he was the first professor who taught the reformed doctrines. In 1543 he quitted Frankfort for a similar position at Leipzig, his contention that it was the duty of the civil magistrate to punish fornication, and his sudden departure, having given offence to the authorities of the former university. He was in England again
